Intelligent Wireless Sensor Network for Ornamental Plant Care

Technological advances for smart homes have enabled us to communicate with home devices through the internet using smart-phones, tablets and computers from anywhere in the world. In this paper we present an Intelligent Wireless Sensor Network to continuously monitor changes in the soil humidity content and ambient room temperature of ornamental plants. A web server receives the transmissions of the wireless sensors, stores the humidity and temperature values in a MySQL database, and displays the information using web pages with PHP. The wireless sensors and actuators are based on the WiFi Module ESP8266 and NodeMCU platform which offer the advantage of incorporating open software architectures. The actuators are based on a relay in order to activate an irrigation system using a water pump, as well as a fan whenever needed. In order to supply the correct amount of water to a plant, consideration is given to the type of potting soil where the wireless sensor is installed. Therefore we propose an intelligent technique, based on an artificial neural network and the K-means algorithm, to recognize the potting soil type and therefore supply properly the amount of water to the plants.